I live in a similarly tolerant place. But there does need to be a certain level of assimilation with local cultural norms in terms of baseline public behaviour or things get stressful. An example — I grew up in the UK, which is culturally a ‘free flow’ pedestrian culture with no particular preference for the right or left side of a path. You simply walk through the gaps in the crowd, trying to avoid obstructing or touching anyone else and use body language to signal intent. Australia and New Zealand OTOH are ‘weak preference for left’ pedestrian cultures. So when we moved to NZ and until I understood that (and still sometimes when not thinking) I created annoyance by walking across people trying to keep left.
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